Helping a Social Media Experiment

November 30, 2006

“What’s the speed of a meme’s spread across the net?” asks Scott Eric Kaufman. (A meme, according to Wikipedia, refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another.)

By posting this, Scott’s script will find this post and track how his initial post has spread. (I heard about this via the Uplift Academy mailing list, for the record.) Scott will be doing a panel on Blogs at a conference and wants to track the spread of a meme, and give some hard data on it.

We here at Social Media Club support anything that helps quantify and qualify the speed of information and the social spread of information.

So Scott, good luck and blog speed.

BTW, for the rest of us, what is MLA? There are way too many things named “MLA” that Google finds.

Filed Under Uncategorized · 1 Comment  

Engagement in Media…

November 27, 2006

In preparing for tonight’s meeting of Social Media Club NYC, I got an email from Nick Givotovsky who pointed me to this piece on engagement.

In it he has this quote: ““Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context”. He goes on to show, in my mind, how traditional models tend to have a serious problem with the ’surrounding context’ part, but how the new, interactive media present more opportunities.
His line of thinking is quite relevant to the Social Media space. Glad he’ll be joining us tonight as we discuss “Why people share” and other relevant topics. (There are a few spaces remaining, registration closes at 12 noon).

Filed Under About SMC · 1 Comment  

Lessons Learned at the Advanced PR Technology Conference

November 24, 2006

“It’s not social media if the rest of the PR industry isn’t socializing…”

I was a last-minute invite to the Bulldog Reporter Advanced PR Technology in Practice event in San Francisco recently to discuss Social Media and successful examples in today’s PR landscape.I joined Sally Falkow, a fellow Social Media Club member, and Eric Schwartzman, on the “Brave New World of Social Media” panel.

Presentation at Bulldog's Advanced PR in SF 11/10/06

[Read more]

Filed Under Events, Uncategorized · Comments Off  

Cheating on YouTube

November 21, 2006

This YouTube video documents Time Warner putting up “Superman Returns, The Movie” as a YouTube user, then having >7000 fans in a week. The “fans” are all accounts created the week beforehand. They’re stuffing the ballot box, as it were, to get more visibility for the Superman Returns movie.

To me, this is spamming a Social Media community.

As an organization that is supposed to be discussing the Ethics, among other things, around Social Media, I thought I’d throw this out. Watch the 4 minute video, then Discuss.

Filed Under Ethics, Social Media Tools · 10 Comments  

Social Media Club Portland

November 20, 2006

On Tuesday, December 5th Chris Heuer and Alex Williams will lead a round table discussion on blogs, podcasts and other items of note. They are also accepting suggestions for additional topics, so if there is a subject burning a hole in your noggin – please send it to kristie [at] brainjams [dot] org and we will try to get it on the ‘agenda’.
This roundtable will be held from 6:30pm to 9:30pm and is open to everyone interested in Social Media. It is also free to attend. All we ask is that you pre-register at Eventbrite so we may prepare for your arrival. There will be food and beverages available for purchase and I hear the eats are very tasty at the Hof.
UPDATED 11/29/06: We have secured a venue. The meeting will take place at Fehrenbacher Hof, located at 1125 SW 19th Ave in Portland, Oregon 97205.

Filed Under About SMC, Education, Events, Social Media Tools · 3 Comments  

Social Media Club Phoenix – December meeting

November 18, 2006

The Phoenix group had their first meeting last week with well over 50 people in attendance and lively conversations around the meaning of Social Media, creativity, purpose, platform, and desire to cooperate and support each on the endeavor. Tery Spataro provided me a great quote around the evening with ‘As an “Old Timer”, memories of the early beginnings came back to me as I saw a new resurgence of spirit in a media intended for sharing and collaboration.’ Nice Tery. This gets me all warm and fuzzy.

They are now planning their second meeting to be held on December 14, 2006 from 6:30pm to 9:00pm at La Madeline – in the wine room, located at 3102 East Camelback Road (Camelback and 32nd) in Phoenix. The December roundtable will be lead by Francine Hardaway, Ed Nusbaum and Amanda Vega and they will work with the group to dig a little deeper into what Social Media really is, in addition to covering topics suggested by the Phoenix participants.
There is no cost to attend this roundtable, but we do ask that you pre-register so we may prepare for your arrival.

————–

UPDATED 12/10/06: POSTING UPDATED TO NOTE VENUE CHANGE. THE MEETING WILL BE HELD AT LA MADELINE.

Filed Under About SMC, Education, Events · 4 Comments  

Review of the TechCrunch NY Event

November 17, 2006

I was able to attend and blog the TechCrunch NY party tonight. (Thanks very much to Jeanne.) As a party, it was a great event, and I ran into a lot of cool people. The party itself was quite packed, though since I got there early I was able to sample some very good snacks and drinks. I ended up meeting Peter Rojas, who I’m a huge fan of at Engadget. We didn’t talk Jason even though his news about leaving AOL was just announced, but he did give me advice on a great Flatscreen TV.

Also saw Scott Matthews of Bitty. We’re going to do a fun social media event in the future, I think. Stay tuned. Ran into Kevin Werbach, David Parmet, and others. My photos of the event are at Flickr.

For those who don’t like to read, here’s the quick analysis:

I saw a lot of interesting stuff, but I’m not sure that I saw a lot of ‘game changing’ sites or technologies. There are a huge number of people creating Social Networks around X, where Xis your friends, people you don’t know, music, etc. Most people are incrementing on features that exist already – I didn’t see anything radical, or, in Pip Coburn’s model, something that would get me over the pain of switching from what I regularly use (Flickr, my own blog, etc) to something else.

There are a lot of people creating sites where the wisdom of crowds will make the content great. My question is, when you send the crowd down the long tail, and it begins to thin out, does the wisdom thin out too? Who’s going to write and rate all the content? I totally get that people want to be creators, but do they want to be creators for YOU or for themselves?

These were the questions I am still asking myself after yesterday’s event. Now to the meat of the event:

[Read more]

Filed Under Events · Comments Off  

Chris Heuer Presentation at Search Insider Summit

November 15, 2006

This morning I gave a presentation on Social Media to some of the smartest people in Search Marketing and Search Engine Optimization at the Search Insider Summit hosted by Mediapost. Many thanks to my co-panelist Sally Falkow from Press Feed and our moderator Bill Flitter from Pheedo. I think it went pretty well, and considering this was my 3rd and final PowerPoint I am allowing myself to give in 2006, I am also very happy to be done with it.

As many of you know, I detest panels and podiums, but this felt a little different thanks to Bill jumping into the audience to get things going with some audience participation. Despite the low energy level of the room on the first early morning session of the last day of the conference, it seems that many of the people in the audience did actially ‘get it’.

One of the reasons for agreeing to do a Powerpoint (which I started preparing yesterday afternoon), was that I really do need a presentation I can use on an ongoing basis to give to similar audiences on the ‘conference circuit’. I am sure you can find many ways to improve this presentation, so please do let me know your suggestions. The Powerpoint Presentation is available as a 4.8MB Zip file called “It’s Time to Get Real: Why Social Media might be able to improve your SEO, but you will never reap the full benefits until you really ‘get it’”

Rather than talking forever about the presentation, I wanted to close now with all the links that I did not get to include in the PowerPoint.

Filed Under Events, Social Media Tools · 3 Comments  

My Talk at the Association of Women In Communications, Westchester, NY

November 15, 2006

This is a link to the powerpoint of my talk tonight at AWC of Westchester. Others may use it in accordance with the CC licence.

This basically means that if you take slides from my deck for your own use, according to the Creative Commons site:

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

If you’d like to use things I’ve written for benefit in a commercial setting or venture, please contact me. Thanks.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.